laura.elaine
This is a tumblelog, kinda like a blog but with short-form, mixed-media posts with stuff I like. Scroll down a bit to start reading, or a bit more to read more about me.
a chorus line — only not actually
from what i can tell, i should love the ballet. i’ve never been. i’m putting this on my to-do list for “before 26”. one year, one month, and three-ish weeks. i think i can do it.
dying
papa angel died in january in dallas. uncle alex died last month in los angeles. uncle richard is dying in houston. uncle greg just escaped death in memphis. dad has been hospitalized twice since may.
i send prayer requests every time i get word of something like this. i count on my girls to pray for healing and peace. i count on them to pray for the repose of souls. each time, though, it feels more surreal. it feels like i’m asking them to pray for someone else and their hurt, some other family that isn’t mine.
i know part of that is the absence of family in my life.
i say “uncle alex”, “uncle richard”, “uncle greg”, but in reality, they’re strangers to me.
the connections to my past — to my history, to my story — are dying. quickly. i am losing them left and right and i want so desperately to stop the hands of time, to ask them questions, laugh with them, hold them, love them.
sitting at my papa’s viewing was hard. my papa married into our family after my birth, after his biological children were grown and living away from him. we never really became a family.
angel jr, carmela and michael: i miss you. i miss your laughter, your accents, your intensity about football. and oh lord, the dallas cowboys. i never showed it when i was small but i loved you. i still love you. i was always so excited to know you were coming, i was even excited to see you at the funeral mass, to walk papa down the aisle toward the altar together, like a family. michael, mikey jr — though not so little anymore — was my favorite. you made a cute kid. mikey, you also made a cute kid. i’m sad to not know him or be a part of his life. i know we aren’t related by blood, but you were my family. and i miss you.
i have four cousins in michigan; i don’t know them. their mom moved them cross-country before my first birthday and did not keep in touch. nick, ted, damien and bill. i haven’t seen their dad since i was a small girl either. i don’t know if i’ll ever see him again. that’s complicated.
i drove down as a pre-teen with my mom and grandma to see nick graduate from air force training. one weekend and he was gone again.
ted i’ve never met. damien i’ve never met.
bill calls himself jack now. i’ve only seen him once since his move to michigan. he came through dallas on leave from the marines. he’s a medic for some special little team he says is like the marine equivalent of the navy seals. it sounds interesting and fun, but also very dangerous. (in fact, he was in a humvee accident that left him pretty banged up.) he is the closest to my age and i really connected with him while he was here. i wanted so badly for our story to be different, to hang on to this lost connection. but he left, just like his brother, and all communication ended shortly thereafter.
my uncle richard, the one on life-support, has lived in houston for a long time. he moved my cousin chelsea down there when we were little and i haven’t seen or heard from them since that time. i didn’t much care for chelsea anyway so her moving wasn’t a huge loss at the time. now, though, i wish i had grown up with her.
uncle richard is actually my great uncle, my maternal grandmother’s brother. he’s one of six, the third to pass from this life — and the second to pass this year.
i wish i knew more about uncle richard. i wish i had taken the time to drive to see him, to write him letters, send him cards. i didn’t do those things and now he is gone and i have no way to make that up.
uncle alex died suddenly about a month ago. i still don’t know how he died, or where his body is. he lived alone in los angeles, though i believe he had a daughter out there. alex only came to dallas occasionally - about once every three years - by greyhound bus. he was a short guy, just like my grandma, and round, covered in tattoos. he was bald on top of his head but grew his remaining hair out long enough to fit in a pony tail. he told stories the way i imagine pirates tell their tales from the sea.
uncle alex never came to dallas empty handed. he always had treasures with him, and usually a few swords. i never really understood the sword thing, but he loved them and always seemed to have them. he liked to treat us to nice things, dinners out, and so on. i always felt bad accepting his gifts, knowing he had little money, but he so loved to give.
i loved that about uncle alex. he gave all he had and gave with pride. he never let on that he might be ashamed of not having much. he had what he had and he was grateful. what a spectacular man.
uncle joe and aunt gloria live in fort worth. at papa’s viewing, aunt gloria urged me to find her on facebook. what a laugh i had! i looked and looked but could never find her. it’s been nine months now and i’ve had no contact with either of them. i ashamed of that and hope to make it right sometime very soon.
uncle pete and aunt liz are angels in oak cliff. i love them. uncle pete dotes on me today like he would a tiny little girl. i’m still a princess, just like my aunt liz. he is a gem of a man, i wish i could have longer with him. aunt liz is full-blood native american indian and so beautiful. i wish i could have her skin! it’s smooth as butter and a perfect shade of olive. i love her smile. i love the way their old house smells. i love that uncle pete still has a full head of thick black hair. i need to make it a point to go visit them too, the crazy birds.
that’s what’s left of my mom’s family.
my dad’s family is just as far and out-of-contact.
i have an aunt, uncle, and cousin in north richland hills. that cousin is ten days younger than my sister. he’s a cutie patootie — and a trouble-maker.
i have an aunt and cousin in tennessee. i haven’t seen either of them in over ten years.
i have an uncle in memphis. his two sons are… who knows where.
my biological grandfather on my dad’s side has been gone for years. they buried him without me, the summer after my 7th grade year, i think. i barely knew papa van, but i loved him so dearly. he was a giver just like my uncle alex. he lived in a trailer, alone, on a street named after his family. he apparently had a lot of land and a fish pond. why he never had more than he did, i do not know.
papa van gave me a ring once - a diamond. i assume now it isn’t real, though i thought it was when i received it. it was so beautiful, wrapped carefully and stuffed into a little card.
something i hope i never forget: papa van had the original bitter-beer face. what a riot!
i think it was the summer of 1999 that we met him in arkansas at the family lake house, a good half-way point for everyone. i still have pictures from that trip. i remember he gave all the grandkids the golden one-dollar coins, new at the time. he sat patiently with us while parents swapped out kids for pictures. it was the last time i saw him alive.
my granny and papa live in garland and i don’t go over there nearly enough. i love them so dearly, but i feel i can never escape once i’ve gone over. i suppose going over more would shorten the visits. maybe not, but they’re worth it. we only have so long together, and i will miss them dearly when they go.
papa cannot read or write very much at all, having dropped out of school at a young age to work on the farm. he worked for a little appliance store in dallas for a long time before retiring. he taught me how to shoot a gun, appreciate a hot tub, and the best way to drink milk (freezer-cold). i always say goodbye to him first.
granny used to tell me we were going to neiman’s when she’d take me to goodwill as a kid. unfortunately for her, kids eventually grow up and learn to read. we still laugh hysterically at the story of me reading “good-will” for the very first time.
per usual, i’ve completely abandoned my original thought. oh well.
this weekend, i will go see my granny. because i love her, and i don’t want to regret the days i didn’t spend with her.
I keep posting quotes from this. I might as well post the whole thing:
“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.”
- Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005. (Video)
Erin Featherston’s Apartment via Vogue.com
adore. minus the sheep (which is just plain weird).
Independence Day, 2011
Today was nothing I thought it would be and that’s usually the best. Everything I thought I would do, I didn’t.
Even my go-with-the-flow approach was structured and planned - though I spent most of the day thinking I was being amazingly uncharacteristic. Showers, a face mask, moisturizing without pants (shoutout to Sarah on that one) - it was all nice but not what would, realistically speaking, be labeled as “spontaneous”.
I spent most of my day indoors, silent, listening to nothing but the sound of my own breath - sweeping, dusting, lying still.
This evening my Grandmother came home hot and tired but not hungry. I put on a movie for us to watch - “Listen to Your Heart” - and suggested we stay in for the evening. It was a great movie; it had me hooked from the start. Eventually though my longing for a “normal” Fourth pushed me out the door.
I got Grandma in the car with me, saying we’d go grab a bite to eat and be right back. I knew the fireworks at the country club would be starting soon and figured she could watch as I drove.
The timing could not have been more perfect. As I approached the outskirts of the neighborhood, the first firework was lit and exploded into the sky right in front of us.
I drove slowly to avoid children in the street - and to let her soak it all in. I don’t know when she last saw fireworks, but I know it’s been several years, since Papa had been sick and wasn’t able to drive.
I “detoured” and parked us a block or so away from the fireworks and the crowds, in a quiet lot with few others around. I rolled down all the windows, put “America the Beautiful” on repeat on my iPod, and reclined back in my driver’s seat.
I watched for what seemed like an hour as the fireworks glowed in the night sky. The flashes of green and fuscia and gold lit up the inside of my little car and though I couldn’t see perfectly, I’m positive she was smiling.
Tears streamed down my face as I thought about the freedoms I am allowed in this country. So many freedoms are still denied so many and yet - we have reason to be grateful.
We buried my Papa Angel in January - my Grandma’s love of 24 years - a veteran of war and the most gentle, loving man you’ve ever met. He was quiet, but outgoing. He loved people, laughed at his own jokes, and was generous to a fault. He was on my mind the whole time and I knew he’d be happy that my Grandma was able to see the show, even if it was an obstructed view in a car with no A/C.
After a lengthy drive around town (with music playing, so I could collect myself “in private”), we landed back at home and finished our movie.
Wow. What an incredible piece of art. I love it.
It’s left me missing my Papa Angel more than I thought I could. Grandma is busy getting ready for bed and my mind is racing, wondering where he is and what he’s thinking. Is he praying? Is that what happens?
Am I making him proud? Am I honoring his memory in my relationship with Grandma? Is he going to ask her to come to him soon?
I really hate crying.
ALLISONW.COM - Home of Allison Weiss: Monday, June 13th; or, My Life Is A Slapstick Comedy
let me tell you a tale of horror and despair. it begins yesterday around noon, when my roommate and i woke up and made our way to greenpoint for brunch. whether the result of a gypsy curse, e. coli, or a hangover, i started feeling queasy shortly after finishing a meal that, in…
My heroes! Thanks y’all! (Blow out, 8:30am) (Taken with instagram)
